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Janis' original definition of the term was "a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members' strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action." The word groupthink was intended to be reminiscent of George Orwell's coinages (such as doublethink and duckspeak) from the fictional language Newspeak, which he portrayed in his ideological novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Groupthink tends to occur on committees and in large organizations. Janis originally studied the Pearl Harbor bombing, the Vietnam War and the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Later others have cited groupthink as a contributing factor in the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster as well as the Space Shuttle Columbia disasterSTS-107 on launch day STS-107 was a space shuttle mission by NASA using the Space Shuttle Columbia''. The entire seven member crew was killed on February 1, 2003, when the shuttle disintegrated over Texas during reentry into the Earth's atmosphere. This w, the bankruptcy of Enron, and more recently, the decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003.

1 Symptoms of groupthink

Janis cited a number of antecedent conditions that would be likely to encourage groupthink. These include:

• Insulation of the group
• High group cohesiveness
• Directive leadership
• Lack of norms requiring methodical procedures
• Homogeneity of members' social background and ideology
• High stress from external threats with low hope of a better solution than the one offered by the leader(s)

Janis listed eight symptoms that he said were indicative of groupthink:

1. Illusion of invulnerability
2. Unquestioned belief in the inherent morality of the group
3. Collective rationalizationIn psychology, rationalization is the process of constructing a logical justification for a decision that was originally arrived at through a different mental process. This process can be in a range from fully conscious (e. to present an external defense of group's decisions
4. Shared stereotypeOriginally a stereotype was an impression taken from a form of movable lead type and used for printing instead of the original type. This was generalized into a metaphor for repeating a set of ideas identically with no changes (as would have been possibles of outgroup, particularly opponents
5. Self-censorship; members withhold criticisms
6. Illusion of unanimity (see false consensus effectThe false consensus effect refers to the tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which others agree with them. People readily guess their own opinions, beliefs and predilections as being more prevalent in the general public than they really are.)
7. Direct pressure on dissenters to conformIn psychology, conformity is the degree to which members of a group will change their views and attitudes to fit the views of the group. The group can influence members via unconscious processes or via overt social pressure on individuals. Famous experime
8. Self-appointed "mindguards" protect the group from negative information

Finally, the seven symptoms of decision affected by groupthink are:

1. Incomplete survey of alternatives
2. Incomplete survey of objectives
3. Failure to examine risks of preferred choice
4. Failure to re-appraise initially rejected alternatives
5. Poor information search
6. Selective biasSelection bias is the error of distorting a statistical analysis by pre- or post-selecting the samples. Typically this causes measures of statistical significance to appear much stronger than they are, but it is also possible to cause completely illusory in processing information at hand (see also confirmation bias)
7. Failure to work out contingency plans